Flickr Geofencing protects your privacy

While geotagging your photographs is a great way for you to organize your photo collection and to let people know where you’ve been, it can also be a massive give away of your privacy. In case you’re not sure, geotagging is the act of tagging your photographs with location data. This means that people looking at your photographs will be able to pinpoint the map where the picture was taken. This is great when you go on long trips to many places, and shoot a lot of photographs – at the end of it, you’ll have an easier time sorting all your pictures by location. But what about the photographs you take while at home or in your neighborhood? Anybody can easily use the location data from those photographs to find out where you live – and that’s something you don’t really want happening.Since it is a hassle to have to remember when to disable or enable geotagging, people are left with the option of whether they should geotag their photos or not. Flickr recognized the issue and has implemented a new feature to help solve the problem. Called geofencing, this feature lets users protect their privacy by limiting access of location data to selected users. Users define a geofence on a map, and then choose who gets to view location data for photographs taken in that area. It’s basically that simple. By using geofences, you can ensure that photographs taken while close to home, in your school or work place won’t have location data shown to the public, while all your photographs can still be organized according to their geotags. Geofencing is available now, just head over to your geo privacy page on Flickr to try it out.